Profile: Karl Iagnemma

Posted 09.03.06

NOVA scienceNOW

(This video is no longer available for streaming.) Karl Iagnemma gives new meaning to the notion of the "bookish scientist" (or, in his case, engineer). In addition to working with a team of MIT researchers who are designing robots for NASA, he is also a breakout fiction writer. Brad Pitt has optioned Iagnemma's short story collection for possible feature film development, and his first novel is generating high interest. Smashing the stereotype of the brainy, bespectacled researcher toiling away in a laboratory, Iagnemma illustrates how science and creativity are linked, and how imagination is the key to innovation in any discipline.

Transcript

PROFILE: KARL IAGNEMMA

PBS Airdate: October 3, 2006

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: We all know the popular image of artists:
painters, writers, performers, they're creative but undisciplined; and then
there's the scientist: analytical, methodical, obsessed with accuracy. But
whether these clichés are right or wrong, sometimes the artist and the
scientist are more alike than you think. Check out this guy.

KARL IAGNEMMA (Artist/Scientist): "At the sound of Marya's name, a
shiver began in Henderson's chest that scurried over every inch of his skin. He
felt as though he had been heated over glowing coals, then dunked into an
ocean-sized bath of ice water."

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Meet Karl...

KARL IAGNEMMA: Karl Iagnemma.

NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: Iagnemma?

KARL IAGNEMMA: Iagnemma, yup. It's Italian.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: He's a successful writer of fiction, but
he's also the same person who's been called one of the top 10 innovative
scientists of America. How can he be both?

His father was Emidio Iagnemma. Born in Italy, he came to Detroit, and he
raised his son to be just like him, an engineer.

KARL IAGNEMMA: I ended up following pretty closely in his footsteps. We
shared, definitely, an interest and a love for physics and math.

CATHERINE IAGNEMMA (Karl's Sister): I always knew he had a mind
like my, like my father. They used to go to computer clubs together, you know,
exchange software, and he took drafting classes.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And Karl did some experimenting when his
father wasn't looking.

KARL IAGNEMMA: Friends and I would do various experiments with
combustion, but nothing too serious, no felonies.

KATHERINE IAGNEMMA: He would, like, light tennis balls on fire and throw
them down the driveway.

KARL IAGNEMMA: Uh oh. I knew I shouldn't have given you her name.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: But all those experiments clearly paid
off because Karl went to MIT, where he stayed on to earn his PhD in mechanical
engineering and is now a principal research scientist. And today, he's a top
member of a team of researchers who are designing robots smart enough to
understand their environment. Their algorithms will make it easier for robots
to navigate through truly difficult terrain, and enable NASA to explore parts
of Mars scientists can only dream of reaching today.

KARL IAGNEMMA: Robots right now are pretty dumb. They have a hard time
understanding if something is a bush compared to a stone. For wheeled robots,
the danger is always that you're going to drive somewhere, think it's a safe
place to drive, and you end up getting stuck. And on Mars, you know, you can't
call AAA to tow you out.

PAUL SCHENKER (NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory): As a researcher,
I think Karl brings some of the best qualities you look for.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Paul Schenker manages the Robotics Space
Exploration Technology Program, for NASA, at the Jet Propulsion Labs, in
Pasadena. NASA awarded Team MIT more than a million dollars for research
overseen, day to day, by Karl.

PAUL SCHENKER: He's very objective, patient, thoughtful in framing his
problems. He also brings passion to his work.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: But which work? Let's go back.

Meet the other Karl.

KATHERINE IAGNEMMA: Iagnemma; it rhymes with dilemma.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: His mother, Patricia Iagnemma, was an
English major.

KATHERINE IAGNEMMA: My mother loved literature, so we had books in every
room—in the laundry room, in the family room. Karl would lock himself in
his room and just read and read and read.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Karl could also write. In fact, his minor
at MIT was in writing, fiction writing, which confused one of his advisors.

KARL IAGNEMMA: He said, "Oh, I thought you were studying friction."

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Hard to believe, but true. Also true is
that Karl's short story won a contest for fiction writing—not friction
writing—held by Playboy magazine, in 1998. And while he was writing his
PhD thesis, he started to write his first book.

KARL IAGNEMMA: And I finished it the week after I finished my PhD
thesis.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: On the Nature of Human Romantic
Interaction is meant to sound like a thesis, but don't be fooled. It's an award
winning collection of short stories about characters—many of them
scientists, by the way—who fall in and out of love. Karl proves wrong the
old assumption that science guys can only write science fiction.

KATHERINE IAGNEMMA: I always refer to him as being whole-brained, using
the totality of his brain. I see the dedication that he uses in science applied
to his writing.

STEVE ALMOND (Author, My Life in Heavy Metal,
Candyfreak): I just...I don't think I know anybody who's,
certainly, at that high a level in both those areas. It's rare.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Now, it would be easy to congratulate
Karl for using more of his brain than most of us, which he clearly does. And it
would be a little too easy to marvel at how Karl has managed to succeed at two
professions that would seem to be complete opposites: science and fiction
writing. But, as it turns out, some of the very same skills Karl uses in
scientific exploration come to his aid in, well, making stuff up.

KARL IAGNEMMA: In each discipline, you start with a blank page. You
start with an idea. There are so many parallels between writing and research. I
mean, I view each process as one of increasingly structured creativity.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Okay, so both a writer and a researcher
have to be creative, but just ask any writer or any scientist, and they'll tell
you creativity is meaningless without discipline. Before you can stare at a
blank page or screen, you must get your butt to the chair, and Karl does it day
in, day out.

KARL IAGNEMMA: A lot of writing is just passing the time until something
good comes along, and you don't know when that'll be. So, to be safe, you
should be in that chair as much as you can, on the off chance that, you know, a
miracle will happen and the story will be born.

ANKI IAGNEMMA (Karl's Wife): For Karl, it's a lot about patience
and discipline. That's an important part of his process, I think. He does his
hours whether he gets 10 pages or one paragraph.

KARL IAGNEMMA: A lot of times, I'm in the chair, in the evening or in
the early morning, with my earplugs in, so that I can hear all the characters'
voices, and just typing either nonsense, or typing an outline of a story, or
typing dialogue that may be good, may be not any good. But when the story comes
along, and when you get that germ, that little spark, and you feel it, and you
know it, that's when the actual story writing process truly starts.

STEVE ALMOND: He's really efficient. He believes he's inefficient. "Oh,
it's takes me so long to write." You write so quickly. And I'm like, "Dude, I'm
not going to a lab trying to figure out how to get the machine to go over the
big rock on mars, okay? I'm not even...I'm having difficulty unloading the
dishwasher, okay?"

ALAN LIGHTMAN (Author, Einstein's Dreams, Good Benito and
Physicist): Both writing fiction and doing scientific research are
pretty much fulltime jobs. They're jobs that occupy you 24 hours a day. You're
not a very good friend, lover, husband, wife during this period of months that
you're consumed by a scientific problem. You're not very much fun to be
around.

ANKI IAGNEMMA: I definitely feel that Karl is with me when he's with me,
but I do think that he thinks about his work all the time. Since we moved in
together, and definitely since Sofia came, he has to be more structured in his
work, and he has to set aside hours more. And I think he does that really well,
and that's...and he does that in a very focused way.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: But that structure, those hours, that's a
lot of time spent alone.

KARL IAGNEMMA: Solitude is something, as a writer and a researcher, you
have to be comfortable with. Writing is, you know, really solitary, and
research is, kind of, its little brother.

ALAN LIGHTMAN: When you're solving the equations, you're usually alone
weeks and months. I mean, you will, you'll stop to eat meals.

STEVE ALMOND: The great untold secret about writing is that it's
incredibly lonely. You cannot do it—I can't do it, anyway—with
other people around.

KARL IAGNEMMA: And you have to be okay with that. Some people could
never be okay with that. They just wouldn't enjoy the work, because they would
miss the human contact, or they would miss various aspects of being out in the
world.

STEVE ALMOND: If I show up at my poker game, and I've spent the day
writing, or trying to write, immediately my poker buddies are like...'cause I'm
like, "Hey, how are you doing, guys? All right, what are we...?" And they're
like, "Have you spoken to anyone today? You know, have you talked with
anybody?" They know that like, "Uh oh, crazy, lonely guy...here he is."

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It's hardly a rational way to
live.

ALAN LIGHTMAN: Scientists are passionate about their work. They do it
because they cannot not do it.

KARL IAGNEMMA: You get this little rush. You enter into this state
where the time just seems to pass. It's just the best feeling. And that's why
you want to go back the next day and do it again, because of that feeling.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: But can that feeling carry Karl through
two intense careers? Alan Lightman chose to give up his research career in
physics to become a successful novelist.

ALAN LIGHTMAN: Both the science and the fiction writing are addictions.
At some point, if he wants to be a scientist and he wants to be a novelist, one
of those powerful forces is going to conquer the other one.

KARL IAGNEMMA: "They met as first year graduate students at the Michigan
Engineering Institute, two aggressive young theorists who disagreed about Marx
and Irish beer, but agreed that mathematics was a game, the most elaborate,
wonderful game, like puzzling out riddles posed by God."

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Exhausted and passionate, disciplined and
humble, Karl Iagnemma will continue to write and calculate using his entire
brain. But to his friends, he's just plain old Karl, the walking algorithm for
success.

STEVE ALMOND: If it were me, if I was doing this stuff, I would be like,
"Dude, I've got a robot going to mars. What did you do yesterday? And that was
before lunch. Then I wrote a great short story in the afternoon. Then I hung
out with my beautiful Swedish wife. What'd you do?"

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: If that's not enough: the movie rights to
one of Karl's short stories have been optioned by Hollywood to be produced by
Brad Pitt.

Archival Playboy Magazine material provided by Playboy. Used with
Permission. All rights reserved.

NOVA Series Graphics

yU + co.

NOVA Theme Music

Walter Werzowa
John Luker
Musikvergnuegen, Inc.

Additional NOVA Theme Music

Ray Loring

Post Production Online Editors

Spencer Gentry
Mark Steele

Closed Captioning

The Caption Center

NOVA Administrator

Dara Bourne

Publicity

Eileen Campion
Olivia Wong

Researcher

Gaia Remerowski

Production Coordinator

Linda Callahan

Unit Managers

Carla Raimer
Karen Lally

Paralegal

Raphael Nemes

Legal Counsel

Susan Rosen Shishko

Post Production Assistant

Josh Thurston

Assistant Editor

Alex Kreuter

Associate Producer, Post Production

Patrick Carey

Post Production Supervisor

Regina O'Toole

Post Production Editor

Rebecca Nieto

Post Production Manager

Nathan Gunner

Producer, Special Projects

Susanne Simpson

Coordinating Producer

Laurie Cahalane

Senior Science Editor

Evan Hadingham

Senior Series Producer

Melanie Wallace

Managing Director

Alan Ritsko

Senior Executive Producer

Paula S. Apsell

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0229297. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.